Derek Cianfrance on ‘Blue Valentine’

The past several months of Derek Cianfrance’s life were occupied with a public and in many ways historic battle with the MPAA over the rating for his film, “Blue Valentine.” Thankfully, he emerged victorious and the film’s initial NC-17 rating was overturned in favor of the more commercially-viable R, but this hardly seems like much of an obstacle at all given the 12 year struggle he endured in order to get the film on screen.

That said, Cianfrance remains as passionate about it as he was when he conceived it in 1998, and seemed relatively unfazed by the controversy, which was still in full swing when Speakeasy sat down with him in early December 2010. Speaking to him at the Los Angeles press day for “Blue Valentine,” Cianfrance discussed his own interests and preoccupations both as a moviemaker and –goer, and reflected on the labyrinthine –- albeit necessary -– process he went through to create the film that is currently winning accolades from critics nationwide.

Speakeasy: How much of an understanding of relationships do you have to have in order to document they ways that one doesn’t work?

Derek Cianfrance: I tried to get this movie made 12 years ago, when I started writing it, in 1998. I wrote it because when I was a kid I had two nightmares: one was nuclear war and the other was that my parents would get a divorce. When I was 20, they split up, and I was just so bewildered at the time, and I felt like as I was entering my adulthood then, that I needed to, kind of in a Darwinian way, try to break the cycle that I had seen my parents go through and try and confront it with this piece of work. So I tried to make the film, and it just kept on getting rejected, so I kept on rewriting the script, and I wrote 66 drafts of the script. But when I started shooting it, I realized that I was blessed because I wasn’t ready to make it 12 years ago. I was ready to make it when I had made it, because when I did make it, I’m married now, I have two children, and I don’t think I could have told an honest story about what it’s like to be a parent without being a parent myself, or about the insanity that comes with the mundane tasks of doing the dishes three times a day without actually having spent my time doing those dishes. Or, I couldn’t have told a story abut how beautiful or how great children are in your life, but also how much they end up deferring your personal dreams, because they take so much attention and time. And without all of these experiences, I couldn’t have told this story and approached these characters in an authentic and honest way.

And also, in that time, I became a documentary filmmaker in order to put food on the table, and as a documentary filmmaker, I learned to listen; there’s an archetypal image of a director as the Cecil B. DeMille guy with the megaphone, but in documentary film that megaphone becomes a listening device, and you funnel the world in instead of pushing the world out. And I tried to use all of my training as a documentary filmmaker, and all of my life experience, and the 66 drafts of the script to try to make something that was honest and raw and intimate and relatable. And that’s been the biggest compliment to the film in the last year I’ve been on the road, is that people relate to it. The movie was meant to be a reflection.

What’s great about the movie is that there’s a sort of mutual culpability between the two main characters. How careful did you have to be to make their conflicts significant, but not purely melodramatic?

I’ve always seen the movie as a duet, or a duel, between a man and a woman, between their past and their present, between their love and their hate, between their long-term memory and their short-term memory – if you pick any dueling opposites, that’s what this movie is about. It’s a magnet in that way, so the balance of those opposites was always the trickiest part –- to find the balance between the two perspectives. Now, I love movies so much, but I find a lot of movies to be arrogant in the way they’re kind of know-it-alls –- they have perfect characters on the screen that know everything about themselves. But with “Blue Valentine,” I wanted to make a movie that was more humble than that; that was a movie not about answers, but questions. I wanted to make this movie about that yearning, the questions of that, and not insult the relationship on screen by giving it specific reasons. It’s not adultery, it’s not this one thing happens and that ruins your relationship, because it’s not like that. I wanted to deal more with the erosive quality of time and that mystery, and there’s a thousand reasons for it, but yet, there’s no reasons for it, because it’s just a feeling at the end of the day. To fall in love with someone is just an overwhelming feeling, and when you fall out of love with someone, it’s an overwhelming feeling, and so we just wanted to make something that was honest in that way.

How much of the design of the characters did you contribute and how much did the actors bring to the cohesiveness of their personalities as they interact with one another?

I had a lot of time to work with Ryan and Michelle on this film. I met Michelle in 2003, hot off of the heels of “Dawson’s Creek” and tried to get the film made with her, but couldn’t get it made. She was not financible at that time. And then I met with Ryan in 2005, and again we couldn’t make the film back then; he didn’t think he could play the older part. So we had a long time to work together, long story short, to develop their characters, and I consider Ryan and Michelle to be absolute cowriters of this film with me, though they’re not credited as such. [But] the movie is a lot about generations, and it’s my belief in Darwin and my fear of Darwin, and I think both Michelle’s character and Ryan’s character have this fear of becoming their parents, and near the ending of the present, we realize that if Michelle stays in this relationship, she’s going to end up like her mother, and conversely you realize that Ryan, if he loses this relationship, he’s going to end up like his father. And they’re both trying not to repeat the mistakes that their parents made, which is my inspiration for the film in the first place. That’s the essence and the mystery, and there’s no easy answer to that, and that’s the conflict of the film –- how to avoid our ancestry, how to avoid our past.

The film sets a lot of things up that it doesn’t explain until later, like when her encounter with Bobby in the liquor store gets Dean worked up. How did you figure out that separating explanations from dramatic events in their lives was the most effective way to tell their story as opposed to maybe using a more linear structure?

It’s all pretty intuitive. The structure of the film was very similar to what it was when I first started writing it. And I love revelations, I mean true revelations when you’re watching a movie and you figure it out for yourself, and you’re not told. There’s something so great when you’re watching a movie when you slowly get to know somebody more, because it’s like a real relationship. And that’s why I’m interested in making films about families; my first film was called “Brother Tied,” about brothers. This film is about husbands and wives, and my next film is going to be about fathers and sons. I don’t think we ever know 100 percent of a person, even ourselves, but I think in families, you get closer to people’s secrets and people’s darkness –- and their light, the full contrast of a person. And we just wanted to set that up in the script so the audience could feel smart and learn as the movie’s going as opposed to just sitting back and being fed everything. The audience in this movie has to engage with it and experience this movie, and these are real people on the screen.

Do you feel as a result of having made this movie, is there a sense of completion, or that you learned about relationships in a way that gives you new insights? Or can a film inform or enlighten your own relationships?

The most important thing for me about making this movie, finishing it, is for my kids so that I could show my kids that it is possible. Because for so many years, this movie was like my quest –- it defined me, this quest, and now I’m still in the middle of it because I’m publicizing it. But I love the movie; it’s alive, and to me the danger in spending 12 years on a film is that when I had the opportunity to make it, it would be flat or too expected, so I wanted to really make sure that the movie was still fresh and alive. And I’m proud that I think it is — I feel like there’s real things happening on that screen. But I’m not by any means done. I’m still exploring so many things, and I still have so many questions, and I’ll continue to make movies about those questions.